YOG Shooting

The determination of the athletes. The look on their sweaty, exhausted faces at the final, deciding stages of the competition. The shouts that arise from the arena(well, at least for sports like taekwondo and table tennis, in which loud sounds are allowed to express yourself). These expressions will never be forgotten by many people in Singapore.
Whilst this spirit of determination and never-say-die attitude is definitely commendable, there is a topic which I want to raise today. It might seem insignificant to spectators, but to competitors of this sport, the stress that they go through is immense.
The sport in question is the sport which I practice, Shooting. More specifically, the category of air weapons. It is a YOG sport, but one that is not very much publicised. Spectators would much rather go and watch other sports which appear to have a tenser atmosphere. However, in Shooting, the silence of the range is only broken by shots by the weapons of the competitors. The silence is deceiving, and hides the tense, quietly crackly electric atmosphere in the range. Shooters have been trained to maintain their calm in periods of this kind of stress, but occasionally we see that competitors hang their heads and try to control their ragged breathing, which results from the mental stress that the shooter faces. The camera catches these details, but the spectators always seem to fail these little details that are only a subtle sign of the tense atmosphere in the range.
Shooters who sit down and silently get themselves mentally prepared for their next shots are deemed to weak by spectators to even stand for more than 2 minutes to take around 3 shots. However, more often than not, spectators seem to think that 3 shots wouldn't make a difference among the 60 competition shots that make up the score for the competitor. Only at the end of the competition do spectators appreciate how one or two points separate the first and second places in the competition. But by then, most of the spectators have wandered out of the range in boredom because of the lack of what they see as "suspense" in other kinds of sports.
No shouts come from the mouths of the shooters when they finish a shot. Their faces remain impassive when they finish a shot, but internally, turmoil is raised when they make a mistake on the last shot, and the only sign is when they take a break, click open the gun cock, open the gun chamber and take in a few deep breaths. A loud sound made intentionally would disqualify you from the range, hence the deafening silence in the range has a profound meaning in it. It builds up the stress in the shooters, while giving them no way of relieving it, but the same silence also keeps the spectators oblivious to the amount of stress the competitors are under.
Only small smiles light up the winners' faces or looks of disappointment fall across the under performers at the end of the day.
And how do I know all this? Because I go through it in training everyday.